After playing through a game with the week 4 & 5 updates (starting with ground up character creation), I noticed that the races are still glaringly imbalanced. Let me preface by saying I understand that "perfect" balance isn't achievable or desireable without risking some degree of diversity, but the devs need to take some steps to help close the gap.

Droids Still Suck

Early in the game, characteristics far outweigh the value of skills - especially when you only have 1 rank spread across 9 skills. With a pitifully low starting characterstic pool, droids are a jack of all trades that can't accomplish very much effectively. Extra career skills are hardly worth the hit in characteristics, especially when you can't "stack" the skills.

Recommendation: Droids need to have their starting XP bumped up by 35, to a total of 210.

Trandoshans Can't Hit Anything

For a race that is described as hunters, they sure do suck at anything that involves shooting without substantial XP investment. Regeneration is a "nice to have" but really doesn't seem to be worth the XP hit (down to 90). Also, it should be noted that a couple extra wounds really doesn't do much either - it's a "nice to have" but most times if you get slammed 2-3 times, you're KO'd. The extra wounds *might* keep you alive, but it's not a gaurantee.

Recommendation: Bump the Trandoshan's starting Agility to 2; reduce their starting Intelligence to 1. Also increase the starting XP pool to 100.

The background of this post is this: in my gaming group, I've got a Rodian with Agility 4 (40 XP investment) and no training in ranged - heavy; I've also got a Trandoshan with Agility 3 (50 XP investment) and two ranks in ranged - heavy.

Guess who hits more? The Rodian. And sure, the Trandoshan is able to invest more XP in getting his ranged skill up to 4… but look at the cost of that, as compared to the Rodian's meager 40 XP investment. So many skills that are STAPLE to the SW universe rely on Agility (piloting, shooting) it seems really rough to have a race of bounty hunters have 1 Agility.

And for the record, I don't even like Trandoshans. We don't need their scum.

Exalted5 said:

Thats a good point about Trandoshans only having 1 Agi, the walking handbags should have their agi increased to represent their "hunter" background . The source of the problem you've described above is primarily due to the f***ed dice probabilities asscociated with upgrading ability dice to proficiency dice. I think everyone here would expect Agi 3/Ranged 2 to outperform Agi4/Ranged 0. But it simply doesn't.

-WJL

LethalDose said:

Accurate. In fact, I posted a suggestion to this in the dice mechanics thread:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=318&efcid=46&efidt=702776&efpag=4#727920

The short of it is to either explore modifying the d12 dice faces to include more successes, or, if that isn't an option, have triumph count as three success symbols instead of just one; the same would be true for despair (counting as three failures).

The dude rolling 1 green and 2 yellows should be consistently out-shooting the guy with 4 greens.

I won't argue about Droids, as it's pretty clear they need some revisions. I think the best fix for droids is to let them assign one characteristic of their choice as a 3, three of their characteristics a 2, and the remaining two characteristics default to a 1, but reduce their starting XP to 100. This way, you've got versatility in deciding what your droid is best at, but not to such an extent as to be problematic.

As for Trandoshans, they've typically been sub-par at Dexterity/Agility-related tasks since the earlier days of Star Wars RPGs. So an Agility of 1 fits this. There's also the fact they're a lot better at melee (higher Brawn, claws) than most other species (exception being Wookiees).

As for accuracy vs. a Rodian with a ranged weapon, the Trando is trying to beat the Rodian at that species' own game. Also, being a hunter is about far more than just simply shooting things, to say nothing of Rodians also having a cultural trait of being expert hunters in their own right. It's akin to a player complaining that his Twi'lek isn't automatically as good a brawler as a Wookiee PC, or expressing amazement at why so many people loose money gambling while out in Vegas. The Rodian's a good shooter, but the Trando's going to have the edge if things get up close and personal.

The increased Wound Threshold combined with the higher-than-average Brawn means that Trando can take at least one more hit than a Rodian in a lot of cases, and not need as much healing to come back from unconsciousness. While their regeneration isn't all that flashy, being able to heal up quicker after a fight has it's own advantages.

For the record, as it were, we've got a Trando Marauder in the Sunday Skype group I game with, and he's been pretty **** effective in melee (though how much that will change since vibro-knives got nerfed remains to be seen), where the player is playing to his species' strengths rather than trying to compensate for where he's not the best. Heck, the player is quite amused and enthused about the fact that unlike so many other RPGs, he can get away with making Dexterity/Agility a dump stat.

1) I rather like the idea currently behind droids. It seems like they are trying to encourage people to specialize droids down a very narrow path. Which makes sense for the typical droid in the Star Wars universe. 3PO is great at languages & protocol but rubbish at everything else. Astromechs (except R2 who is oddly over powered) are good at helping a ship in flight but are rather limited in other capacities. I think the issue is that you have to spend too many of those extra experience points to increase the incredibly low characteristics. I also think that droids should be allowed a skill or two that they can have capped at 3 for character creation. Of course that might get into the realm of over specialization and be too good for munchkin types. I think the designers have a good idea behind droids as is, it just needs a little more fine tuning.

2) Trandoshans are great as is. They are slow but tough as nails, I could not think of a thing to make them more in line with solid mechanics and matching up with lore.

Lord of Malice said:

I agree - currently droids work fine as long as u envision them as one-trick characters ei. mechanically you have misunderstood something if you dont make a droid with a single stat of 4 or 5 and 1 in all the others … maybe a 2 … ofcause I also tend to think this might like Malice said, make them too specialized for non-npc …

As a sidenote - in our group we were joking about making a droid Politico 'Leaderbot 101' … (imagine machine voice) Loading motivational software - YOU,,,ARE ,,,NOW….MOTIVATED … - exposable fleshbeings go now fight for your leader fight for the machines!! Resistance is futile ….

I'll conceed the point on Trandoshans… but I still think a characteristic of 1 is debilitating. Keep in mind that the difficult to hit something at short range is 2 dice; that means the average Trandoshan will fail at that task (we're taking about shooting something 10 yards away). Seems wrong.

As far as droids go, a few of you guys have described them as focused experts. This is exactly what they're NOT. Gaining one rank in 9 different skills doesn't make you focused in anything; it makes you marginally "okay" at a bunch of different tasks.

I liked the idea that droids should be able to train skills to rank 3 at character creation… I would rather see this instead of having multiple skills (or give them the choice of either-or). I still feel really strongly about giving droids more starting XP. Do the math and you'll see they're numerically handicapped compared to every other species when it comes to characteristics.

Exalted5 said:

Amen! Preach it Brother Efidm!

Lord of Malice said:

LethalDose said:

And… boredom strikes again…

I really hate this forum software when it comes to things like tables and such… why does it force you to paste stuff in another window…

So… First table is Count of either Successes or Advantages (0..8), % Successes (3 Agi, 2 Skill), % Advantages (3 Agi, 2 Skill), % Successes (4 Agi), % Advantages (4 Agi)

Count Success Advantage Success Advantage
0 5.54% 12.54% 6.22% 6.27%
1 20.88% 26.02% 18.73% 18.75%
2 31.94% 29.45% 27.38% 27.40%
3 26.06% 20.15% 24.53% 24.59%
4 12.15% 9.08% 14.97% 14.83%
5 3.10% 2.43% 6.16% 6.13%
6 0.34% 0.34% 1.71% 1.70%
7 0.00% 0.00% 0.29% 0.30%
8 0.00% 0.00% 0.02% 0.02%

And here is the table of the actual results. 2 upgrades means a 16.06% chance of 1 or more Triumphs (which are counted as one success, but don't have a way to merge them as advantages). Without any upgrades you have no chance at Triumphs. The table was sorted in descending order of % chance of the 3 Agi, 2 Skill results. With 4 Agi, you have a 0.02% chance of getting nothing whatsoever, while 3 Agi 2 Skill has a 0.09% chance of getting nothing on the roll. Like in other tests this is because rolling more dice means more have to show blank to get the blank result which is always harder to do (rolling 1 20 is a 1/20 chance. rolling 2 20s in a row is a 1/400 chance… etc…). Also note, the peak result for 3 Agi 2 Skill is 8.69%, while 4 Agi was 8.42%, which is interesting as 3 Agi 2 Skill has more possible results (49) than 4 Agi (45).

Result 2 Proficiency, 1 Ability 4 Ability
aass 8.69% 7.50%
aasss 8.30% 8.38%
aaass 7.99% 8.42%
asss 6.76% 5.33%
aaas 5.49% 5.36%
ass 5.03% 3.54%
assss 4.84% 4.90%
aaaas 4.40% 4.86%
aas 4.31% 3.53%
aaasss 3.56% 6.52%
aassss 2.85% 5.33%
aaaass 2.84% 5.28%
sss 2.44% 1.38%
ssss 2.43% 1.73%
Tasss 2.27% 0.00%
Taass 2.25% 0.00%
as 1.99% 1.27%
Tass 1.75% 0.00%
aaaa 1.49% 1.69%
ss 1.48% 0.69%
aaaaas 1.39% 2.63%
sssss 1.38% 1.37%
aaa 1.38% 1.36%
asssss 1.38% 2.63%
Tsss 1.24% 0.00%
Taasss 1.22% 0.00%
Tssss 1.07% 0.00%
aaaaa 1.04% 1.37%
Taas 0.88% 0.00%
Tassss 0.87% 0.00%
Taaass 0.87% 0.00%
Taaas 0.86% 0.00%
aa 0.85% 0.67%
Tss 0.70% 0.00%
s 0.52% 0.19%
Tas 0.52% 0.00%
Taaaas 0.35% 0.00%
a 0.35% 0.19%
Tsssss 0.34% 0.00%
ssssss 0.34% 0.67%
aaaaaa 0.34% 0.68%
TTsss 0.18% 0.00%
TTass 0.17% 0.00%
Ts 0.17% 0.00%
TTss 0.09% 0.00%
TTasss 0.09% 0.00%
0.09% 0.02%
TTaass 0.09% 0.00%
TTssss 0.08% 0.00%
aaaaaaa 0.00% 0.20%
aaaaaaaa 0.00% 0.02%
aaaaaaas 0.00% 0.10%
aaaaaas 0.00% 0.78%
aaaaaass 0.00% 0.23%
aaaaass 0.00% 1.74%
aaaaasss 0.00% 0.39%
aaaasss 0.00% 2.53%
aaaassss 0.00% 0.47%
aaassss 0.00% 2.53%
aaasssss 0.00% 0.39%
aasssss 0.00% 1.76%
aassssss 0.00% 0.24%
assssss 0.00% 0.80%
asssssss 0.00% 0.10%
sssssss 0.00% 0.19%
ssssssss 0.00% 0.02%

Yeah… This is why we should just post histograms of dice results up here…

Exalted5 said:

Shooting something 10 yards away, from the hip (i.e.: not aiming or anything), in the middle of combat. When taking the time to line up the target, or shooting out of the stress of combat, you can add 2 [boost] from aiming. Suddenly that target 10 yards (metres for me) away becomes a lot more hittable.

Exalted5 said:

I also like the idea of allowing droids to train career skills higher at character creation, gives them a bit of an edge. I'm hesitant increasing their starting traits or XP though. Personally I don't think droids should have a lot of 2s and 3s in characteristics. If you look at the droids in the source media (pick movies, comics, games, really any SW media), they all tend to have one or two things they're really good at, and as pretty much useless at everything else. I think a typical droid should have one characteristic at 4-5, maybe one or two characteristics at most at 2-3 and the rest at 1. I wouldn't want to see a system that allowed droids to have a bunch of 2s and 3s in characteristics with maybe one 4 and one 1, like most other PCs.

LethalDose said:

Something that has occurred to me. In most other games skill rarely outperforms attribute until later in the game. In Star Wars D6 you can't add more than 2D to a skill from the starting attribute. So, in the case of a wookie vs a human, the sheer starting strength would allow it to beat a human in melee even with no improvements to the skill.

In D20, having a high strength (and/or a high dex) in the early game gave a starting character a boost in combat.

We're seeing the same thing here. Until skill is higher than attribute, then it slightly helps. Once a character gets enough skill points, the situation goes the other way and can be done cheaper than pumping up the attributes. I think the way FFG is doing this, helps to change the ideas behind improving a character. By denying players the easy ability to pump up their attributes it encourages them to look elsewhere to improve their characters. So, while having a high starting attribute value gives one a leg up early in the game, it has less of an impact as Talents and skill upgrades start to add up.

Kallabecca said:

Yup. This. Exactly.

I also completely agree with a Droid tweek. Allowing them to max out skill ratings makes perfect sense and they should probably have access to a fewer variety of skills, not more. Players should ideally be able to construct any type of droid from the book at creation.